Work Progress

Today I tied up loose ends before my trip to Wien, Milano and Zürich. I made comments on a paper Jenny gave me to read. I wanted to get this back to her before I left. And I made my slides for my discussion in Milano. Well, I got them mostly done.

3/5

Park along the Rhine

On the map, I could tell that there was a park not far from my office. But, because there is a train yard in between, I did not know how to get there. So I asked . Here are some photos (that don't do it justice. There is a track (how many meters around?) where I will try to go jogging every now and again.Looking up the Rhine
and down the Rhine

Stadtfest (City Party)

This weekend is Mannheim's Stadtfest, a big party nominally for the kids but there will be lots of beer and music into the night. They set up tents and vendors all along the planken, the pedestrian mall downtown. The Germans sure know how to throw a party. I walked over this afternoon to check it out. Here is a picture looking one way ...and here is looking the other way.
This is the main stage, there are two others, being set up.
I will go back tonight to see what it is like when the kiddies go to bed. I won't stay up too late as I leave for Wien tomorrow morning.

Work Progress

Forgot to post yesterday. Probably because of a disappointing setback. The ISI journal database is just too big at 2 million citations. My computer crashed. Next week, they will install a computer for me to use that has more memory. If that does not work, I will have to process in chunks. Bummer.

1/5

Planning to meet up With Jon

My brother Jon and his family will be vacationing in France and into Germany late next month. We just exchanged emails trying to see if we can meet up. They have found a charming family run hotel on the Mosel river that is between Mannheim and Trier, not far. These are photos from the hotel's homepage.





I will try to go to Trier on this little jaunt.

Work Progress

I checked my work from yesterday - some minor mistakes that I have fixed. And I have written the code that attaches the institution key to match from one dataset to the other. I forgot, and this is really dumb, that I also need to match on journal. The whole exercise is that some institutions have access to some journals at a point in time. So, I have started to aggregate all of the cited references and parse the fields into cited year, author and journal. This is a computer intensive task and I have just set the other computer to work on this all night. After this, I will have to again map all of the misspellings of journal names into a common format for merging. This will not be as tedious because there are at most 300 relevant journals whereas there were 2,500 research related institutions. Progress is being made.

4/5

Work Progress

After days of mind-numbingly dull work, I finally have a key to match institution names in the journals dataset to journals in the JSTOR dataset. I am a little worried because my casual observation of the data suggests that JSTOR does not appear randomly across institutions. I might be able to deal with the selection issue with some instruments. Even if I do not have a suitable non-JSTOR group, I still have variation over time and across journals on availability through JSTOR. I have 1,700 matching institutions (out of 3,000+ I had to attempt to match from JSTOR), and 30 years of data, I am not worried about a lack of power problem.

I will check my work in the morning. And backup!

4/5

Work Progress

Tedious matching of names from one file to another. Has to be done "by hand." About half done with this new task. 2/5

Travel Plans - Wien, Milano, Zürich

Next week, I am to go to a conference on "Endogenous Growth" in Milano on 5-6 June. On, 2-3 June, my hosts at the ZEW will be "evaluated," meaning that I could easily find myself "in the way." So, this was a good time to tack on some site seeing. I spent a couple of hours yesterday making travel plans. I intend to get maximum use out of my Eurail pass. So, on Sunday, I travel to Wien (Vienna) for three days before heading back to Milano on 4 June for the conference. The hotel in Wien, in particular, looks quite charming and was a steal. Since I will have effectively gone around the Alps to get to Milano, on the way "home" to Mannheim I will spend 7 June in Zürich.

This is roughly what my route looks like.

I am open to any suggestions about what I should see in these locales.

Work Progress

For Monday, I was able to get the JSTOR data into a format that, for each institution (usually a university) and each journal, I have the date that the institution obtained online access to the journal. Unfortunately, I now have to find a common institution name between the JSTOR data and the journal data for about 3600 institutions. 3/5

Boat Ride along the Nekar

The IBZ, the organization that runs the guest house I am staying, organized a boat trip up the Nekar River from Heildelburg. About ten of us went along and it was great fun meeting people from Australia, China, Brazil, Iceland, Romania, Germany, and the US. This was a large boat with 100 or more passengers that had a upstairs and downstairs and a restaurant where I got lunch and ein Pils.

Both Mannheim and Heidelburg are on the Nekar, Mannheim where it meets the Rhine and Heidelburg where the terrain changes from flat farmland to hilly woods. Mannheim is more industrial and Heidelburg is quite lovely, smaller and more touristy. They are about 30 minutes apart by train. We took the train upriver to Heidelburg and then the boat a little ways further up river.

View Larger Map
This is the typical view from the boat.We went through two locks.
This is an ancient castle (schloss) along the way. The older one just "next door"is from the 12th century.There was some sort of rowing regata going on just down stream from where we embarked.
This is the magnificent Heidelburg Schloss. I will return and take pictures from within.

All of us in the group will exchange photos. Others took pictures of the members of the group. When I get these, I will post their pictures.

Work Progress

Spent all day cleaning institution names. Got the nonUS done and now am turning to the US institutions. Man, there are a lot of places where people do economic research.

I have not yet found a way to collaborate with the folks here at the ZEW. I want to earn this visiting position by giving as good as I get. At lunch with Marianne, I discovered that many of the folks here are using a survey of firms they conduct here. When I grilled here about the content of this dataset, she said that everyone know a bit or piece but not all. The data sound great, so they are going to try to find a way for me to see what is in it so I might help with research questions and identification strategies.

3/5

Work Progress

0 out of 5.

A Walk About - part Zwei

The Luisenpark is really quite lovely. It rivals more well-known gardens I have seen in other cities. There were lots of young families and older couples - oh so sweet.Here is a boat ride around the large lake inside the park.
Lots of families.
More families.
Outside of the Chinese garden, there is a nice waterfall that you can walk behind. The back side of water.
The Chinese pagoda.
Serves as a tea room.
Say cheese.
Just like my backyard - right.
A restaurant overlooking the lake.
I got tired and so rested at a performance of Swan Lake. Again, very sweet.
This is to regular chess what the wii is to video games. Actually, these were plastic and looked quite light. But it was fun to see kids playing chess by walking around with peices.
Another fountain.

A Walk About - part Ein

Today is a holiday (I do not know what for) and few come to work. So, I went on a walk about. At lunch yesterday, Jörg mentioned the Luisenpark was quite nice. It was a little further than I expected but, I need the exercise.

View Larger Map
On the way, I went by the Wasserturm (Water Tower) that is a trademark of the city.

I love the fountains.
The staircase of water coming down from the tower and the covered walkway beyond.
Fountains toward a boulevard.

My Office

Such that it is.

Work Progress

I spent almost all of today checking for spelling errors. Almost 10,000 names show up as the institution from which an economist published an article. And that is just outside of the US. Many are simple misspellings or multiple spellings from transliterations. Two-thirds of these institutions show up just once and are not likely to make it into my analysis. However, if it is a misspelling of a big university, I should try to catch it. I have gone through the file once now and fixed as many as I could find. Will try again tomorrow. Today was a 2 out of 5.

My Apartment

The apartment I am using is part of a guest house run by the University of Mannheim. It is about as I expected - nice enough but not overly luxurious. It is less than five minutes walk to either the university or the ZEW.

Here is the kitchen. It is small but bigger than I need. The lower art of the cabinet on the right is a refrigerator.

Just across from the cook area is a small table and two chairs.

The first thing you see when you enter the apartment is the desk. The kitchen is to the left and the living room/bedroom is to the right. If you look closely at the laptop in the photo, you can see that I am trying to find a wifi network. Alas, I have not been able to piggyback off of any of the wifi networks that my laptop finds. Like many people, I have to do my surfing at "work."
The living room has some nice storage units that will go unused.
Here is my bed, to the right of the storage unit photo. There is a cupboard for cloths on the left and a closet for hanging things on the right. The bed is comfortable enough. Or, perhaps I have just been so jet lagged. I slept 11 hours again last night.
The outside of the building is really rather "nondescript." I am on the third flight up, the second from the top floor pictured here.

Work Progress

I am going to try to post at the end of each day on the progress I have made toward completing my projects. Today, I had lunch with four of my colleagues (Marianne Saam, Katrin Schleife, Bettina Müller, and Andrea Mühlenweg), I met with the president of ZEW, Wolfgang Franz, for 15 minutes, met briefly with Martin Peitz and discussed my current project with Jörg Ohnemus. Nice networking if I do say so myself.

As far as my current project goes, I am trying to see the impact of an online electronic database of past journal articles on future journal article production. I have data on all articles published in the last 30 years and when different institutions obtained access to JSTOR. There is a knotty problem is parsing the journal data into actual institution affiliation. The problem emerges because sometimes "Univ Texas" refers to Austin and sometimes to its satellite campuses. This occurs in other states too. Since I expect a bigger impact in non-flagship schools, I want to make sure I identify them correctly. A way to solve this is to use the zip code of the author to place him on a campus. Well, I hit upon a new algorithm to do this and it looks like it will be able to extract the zip code for 99.9% of US affiliations. On a five point scale of work productivity, today was a three.

Traveling to Mannheim

Oh the Joy. I think that there was one empty seat on my flight to Frankfurt, and it was next to me. When you are 6' 3", this is like winning the jackpot. I might have even got two hours of sleep.

Going through passport control and customs was a breeze as it usually is in Frankfurt (economies of scale?). The train station at the airport is cool.

Flughafenbahnhof Frankfurt

The train station in Mannheim is more traditional.

Hauptbahnhof - Mannheim Central Station

I got to the ZEW at about 13:30, Irene introduced me to my new colleagues (so young) and I tried to maintain coherent conversations about their research. Better luck tomorrow. I got keys to my apartment, unpacked and crashed for 2-3 hours. After that, I had to force myself to stay awake until a decent hour by getting up and walking around the city. I will post pictures of the apartment tomorrow.

End of the IIOC

The IIOC is over. My presentation went well even if the session was not well attended. I got a few good comments from the discussant, Mary Deily of Lehigh U. This alone makes he conference worth the time. In addition, I got ideas for two papers using data I have or have access to. I will have to contact my previous co-authors on these topics (more on these later). It was fun to catch up with old acquaintances and to meet new folks in my field.

Now on to Mannheim (by way of Chicago and Frankfurt).

Like a Kid in a Candy Store

My session at the IIOC is tomorrow, so today I have been bouncing around from session to session listening to the presentations that interest me most. The problem is that there are about a dozen sessions going on simultaneously. I am not interested in all of them but I am usually interested in more than one at the same time. I usually will go a whole year without seeing a presentation on telecom or pharma, but today I saw a half dozen on each and missed a half dozen that I would like to have seen. Besides these, there have been papers on innovation and methods that I have had to miss.

The other problem is how to bounce around surreptitiously. We all do it but its kinda rude to walk out on a presentation, especially when there are only a dozen folks in the audience. I try to find a break between papers and sneak out. This does not always work because, often, I will have just met up with a some of the presenters, they have seen me in the room and they see that I am gone when it is their turn. So, I am a jerk but that is an occupational hazard.

Another characteristic of economists is that we are cheap. Tonight there will be an open bar (actually four bars). What, price is zero? I predict they run out of booze.

Time to Go - to DC

I leave today. First though, I travel to Washington, DC to the International Industrial Organization Conference (IIOC) for a couple of nights. This is the major conference in my field with about 300-400 presentations of new research papers. I can always find interesting sessions to attend and I always come way with lots of good ideas. At this conference, I will present "Video Games, Crime, and Violence." I can only hope that I give more than I get.

Skype is Cool

I am cheap. I do not want to pay for international phone calls while I am away but I do want to talk with my wife and kids, at least every once in a while. So, I downloaded Skype to my laptop and our desktop, bought two $10 headphone/microphone combinations, and tested it out at home. After we figured out how to turn off the microphone mute button, it worked like a champ. There is a bit of a conversation lag, but, it wasn't too bad for our purposes. How long will international long distance survive?

Rejected Again

I am pretty bummed out. On the eve of my departure, I found out that my paper with Wairimu Mugo, “Is Foreign Aid Conditioned upon Institutional Reform?," was rejected for publication again. The paper came out of Mugo's masters thesis that she wrote under my supervision. I keep telling myself that a rejection is better than having no paper to be rejected. ("Tis better to have written and lost than not written at all.")

Writing this paper was something of an experiment I ran to see if there was a side benefit from supervising theses. Supervising a thesis can be a real time sink without much payoff for the supervising faculty member. The opportunity cost is working on your own research, which, we hope, will generate conference invites, publications, citations, raises, awards, and accolades all around. (Oh yeah, also new knowledge useful to the larger world - yadda yadda yadda.) However, if the end product of a thesis is publishable at a decent journal, it very well could be worth the effort. This may not be a good test because development is not my area and one of the referee comments is that we really messed up the literature review.

I am running a simultaneous experiment with another former student, Darshak Patel, that appears to be bearing more fruit. Two ingredients of this experiment are 1) it is in my field so am am better able to place the research and know what would be an important innovation, and 2) as a doctoral student at U. Kentucky, Darshak is still "in the profession" and has a long term interest in seeing his research published (incentive compatibility).

So, ideally, one should only hope for a publishable paper out of a supervised theses if:

1. The student is bright,
2. The topic is in your field, and
3. There is some longer term incentive compatibility mechanism.

Anything else?

Where I'll be

So my apartment will be at M2 18, 68161 Innenstadt/Jungbusch, Mannheim, Germany which is located here. The old town was laid out as a grid with the castle (schloss) at the head and located just SW of the A1 and L1 labels on the map. The ZEW is located at L7 (located just south of the L7 label on the map). Note the distances. I think that my morning walk will be shorter than my current walk to my office from the parking lot. There may even be a Starbucks along the route.

My Hosts

I will be "visiting" the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) group of the Center for European Economic Research, in German, Zentrum für Europäische Wirtschaftsforschung. Everyone calls this ZEW, pronounced zed-eh-veh and not zee-eee-double you.

The individuals I will be interacting with daily are pictured below. I have met many at previous conferences but some are new to me (mostly those on the left side of the picture below). I have been trading emails with the head, Irene Bertschek, second from the right below. Daniel Cerquera, on the far right, and I met last Summer at an ICT conference at ENST in Paris. Jörg Ohnemus, fifth from the right, and I have met a a few ICT conferences in Europe. At earlier ZEW conferences on ICT, Katrin Schleife and Margit Vanberg (6th and 4th from the right) helped me keep from getting lost and played gracious hostess on excursions to historic sites around Mannheim.

Preparing to Go

So I am trying to tie up all of my loose ends before the big trip. Today, I ran around Fort Worth, Arlington and UTA collecting little gifts to give to my hosts at ZEW. Nothing big, just
UTA t-shirts and Texas related items (bluebonnets, armadillos, pecans).

Sharing the Love

While I am away from home and visiting Mannheim, Germany during the Summer of 2008, I will try to keep in touch with family and friends through this blog. I hope to have nearly daily posts about my thoughts, experiences and photos from this trip. Stay tuned.